An Inevitable Decision
by foojules
Summary: After a dinner where Robert makes it clear that Sarah Bunting is no longer welcome at Downton, she is the one to break with Tom.


_AN: I know this isn't the WWR update many of you are probably waiting for—sorry! You'll have to excuse me as well for writing (almost) canon. :) _

_This came about after I watched the dinner scene in which Robert throws a Bunting-related tantrum (I know... that doesn't narrow it down much, does it?) and expresses his wish to "see [her] leave this house and never come back!" Instead of what actually happened (Sarah remaining at the table) I thought Sarah would be much better off if she marched straight out of that dining room and dumped Tom's indecisive ass. (Hon, he's just not that into you.)_

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><p>Blood thrummed in Sarah's ears as the echoes of Lord Grantham's steps died away in the shocked silence. For a few seconds she couldn't even form a coherent thought: for Sarah, whose brain was always humming with commentary whether or not it was appropriate, this was a truly rare occurrence.<p>

Scorn was the emotion that burned away her embarrassment. _Really,_ she thought, _he's behaved like a spoilt child. _These _are the people who have been running our country for thousands of years?_

"Happy now?" Chirped Lady Mary with a supercilious smirk. Princess Mary, more like. She and her father were cut from the same cloth: snobbish, attention-seeking, and possessing infuriatingly archaic views alongside even more infuriating delusions of progressiveness. _Odious woman._ Sarah took a quick glance round. Not an ally in sight. The Dowager was pursing up her wrinkled lips as though she disapproved, but Sarah could tell by the mean sparkle in her eyes that she hadn't had this much fun in years, the old bitch.

Of all the eyes at the table, Tom's downcast ones hurt the most.

Sarah pushed back her chair and stood, feeling as though she were trapped in a nightmare: specifically, the one she used to have when she'd first begun teaching, in which she would find herself at the front of the schoolroom in her underclothes. The gentlemen stayed seated. She couldn't be sure whether they were frozen in shock or lodging a mute protest against her audacious talk of serfs rising up against their masters and under-cooks studying algebra, not necessarily in that order.

"I'd best leave," she said, her voice echoing off the crystal and clattering against her ears.

"Yes," said Mary. "I think you'd better."

_Please don't let my dress catch on the tablecloth,_ Sarah prayed as she turned toward the door. _Please don't let me trip on the rug, please don't let me stumble—_and she was clean away, wrapped in the echoing gloom of the hall. She breathed a sigh and made herself walk, not run, toward the exit.

_Never again._ She would give Lord Grantham his wish: this would be the last time she darkened his door. She was tired of being baited, looked down upon, _suffered_. How could they not know that it was _their _worldview, not hers, that was the backward one?

Easy: they were protected. The Crawleys lived surrounded by layers upon layers of luxury and privilege, so many that the sights and sounds of want and struggle could never penetrate. They'd never hear the mob coming for them until it was too late. Not that Sarah held out much hope for a people as stolid as the British engaging in anything so galvanic as revolution.

Well, the Crawleys were welcome to all of it: their drafty old pile, their frowning butler, their ingrained sense of superiority. She wouldn't have anything more to do with them. _This village is too small._

She heard footsteps behind her and stiffened. _Just let me go,_ she said to him silently. _It's what you want to do anyway._

"Sarah."

She stopped, promised herself she wouldn't start sniveling like a lovesick schoolgirl, and turned around to face him.

-o-

Left at the table, Tom had to fight to keep down the little bit of dinner he'd managed to eat. He'd been expecting something like this to happen all night. Of course he'd hoped it wouldn't, but that was like putting hydrogen and oxygen together and hoping they wouldn't explode.

In the vacuum left by Robert and Sarah's grand exits, he could feel everyone's eyes settle on him. It was the thing he'd hated most since he and Sybil were married: being looked at by these people, their judgement on him like a physical weight. They'd never looked at him when he was a chauffeur, not really. For them he'd not been a man so much as a man-shaped thing that made the car go. As long as he did that and kept his face neutral, he'd been free to think his own thoughts. No one had cared, except Sybil.

_They are your family now,_ he reminded himself. _They love you._ And he loved them: wasn't that what he'd just told Sarah? He raised his head and looked at Mary. Mary, his sister-in-law. His supporter, his partner in both business and grief. She should feel more like an ally at this moment.

Mary's eyes met his, dark and unreadable, and skated toward her grandmother. He shifted his gaze to Isobel, one of the few people at the table who did not seem to be suppressing a burst of glee. She caught his eye and gave a barely perceptible nod toward the door Sarah had just gone out of.

Go after her: of course. It was the right thing to do. Soothe Sarah's ruffled feathers, deal with Robert's later, when he'd have to apologize—again—for the behavior of his controversial friend, when they both knew that the apology was at least in part for the fact that she existed at all, for even the shadow of a suggestion that Tom's memories of Sybil were not enough to sustain him. _We're not lovers,_ Tom had been so very quick to assure him, a quickness not only for propriety's sake.

Things would calm down. He could bring it about: he was not a revolutionary but a peacemaker. Things would calm down, Cora or Rose or hell, maybe even Mary would invite Sarah back, and he'd wait for the same thing to happen. Like the same horse on a merry-go-round coming round again and again, forever turning in a circle. The thought exhausted him.

But of course he stood, grimacing and muttering something about seeing if Sarah needed a lift to the village, and walked into the hall.

She was practically to the door already: hatless and without her wrap, such was her haste to be gone. Her little shoulders were squared, her curls bouncing along with the determined heels of her shoes as they rammed against the floorboards. Tom felt a sudden, all-encompassing wave of guilt. He of all people should know what it felt like to be chewed up and spit out at that table. He might not have invited her here _per se_, but he was the reason for her presence. And he'd all but abandoned her to the wolves.

When he said her name, he could tell she heard the regret in his voice by the arrangement of her features into an expression that somehow conveyed both openness and skepticism: _All right, convince me._

Once he would have had the right words to say. But then, once he would have known what he wanted. He didn't now. Did he wish to keep her friendship or turn it into something more, as she plainly hoped? Or should he break with her cleanly, and as kindly as possible? These days work was the only sphere in which he could be decisive.

After a moment her mouth drew in and she sighed, her eyes finding the floor in obvious disappointment. "I'd be grateful," she said, "If you'd tell Daisy from me that I'm very sorry to have caused her embarrassment."

"You could tell her yourself, at your next lesson."

Sarah tossed her head, the dubious look on her face that she directed at people she thought especially dense. "How can I keep on teaching Daisy, when I'm not welcome in this house? Do you expect her to meet me at the Grantham Arms between courses?"

His temper flared up—of course he didn't, he wasn't bloody stupid—but he tamped it down. _Make peace._

"I'm sorry. I only thought… Daisy values her lessons so highly, there must be a way you and she could manage."

"And continue to divide her loyalties? That's how your father-in-law would see it." She practically spit the words. "And don't try and tell me it isn't true."

"Sarah, please." Tom put out his hand and she drew back, lips thinning.

"Speaking of divided loyalties." She took a breath and let it out in a rush. "Maybe it's best if we don't see each other any more." Her eyes came up to touch his, dropped again. She looked pained but entirely serious; it wasn't Sarah's style to try to reel him in by pushing him away.

Surprise was not among the emotions her suggestion raised in him. If he was honest, for the last while he'd been expecting this relationship to come to nearly as explosive an end as dinner had tonight. His feelings were a slurry, too murky to tease out every ingredient. There was loss, yes: but also a certain relief. The inevitable had finally happened.

"You'll never be free of their opinion as long as you stay here," she continued, as though his silence were a protest. "And they'd never accept me, we've seen that." She was looking straight at him now. It was naked on her face: what she wanted him to say was that he didn't care if they accepted her.

"Sarah, I—" something caught in his throat and he cleared it. "You've been a good friend to me, and I don't have many. The last thing I want is to hurt you."

"I'll admit I've let myself care for you. Far too much, I'm afraid." She smiled a little and shook her head as though talking of a foolish student. "But I could never love a man who won't stand up for me. Not really."

The words cut deep. An angry defense rose to his lips and immediately subsided; Sarah had played her part in tonight's fray, but that wasn't the point. The point was that even if Tom couldn't take her side, she needed him in her corner. And they both knew he wasn't there.

He had seen enough to know that for most people, love like his and Sybil's didn't come along once in a lifetime. Twice was far too much to expect, especially in his singular situation; probably the best he could hope for was to find someone he could get on with tolerably well. Sometimes he thought Sarah might be that person. She was easy to talk to and could more than hold her own in a debate. Her wit could be sharp, but she never let it slice anyone lower than her. _She would be good for you,_ he'd told himself more than once. _She'd keep you honest._

But marrying Sarah would mean steeling himself every time she opened her mouth in company. It would mean falling in with her socialist and anarchist friends, with whom he identified less and less

every time he spent time with them. It would mean fights every other night, after she'd said too much or he too little.

It would mean losing the Crawleys, and his last real link with those who had known and loved Sybil as he had.

"I'm sorry I've disappointed you," he said. "And you're right. You deserve better."

She smiled ruefully. "I'm sorry too. But I'm not sorry to have met you."

"I'm very glad we met. I'm not the same man I used to be—and I wouldn't want to be—but I think I'd forgotten who I was. You've helped me to remember."

Sarah raised her eyes from his to the gallery ceiling high above; they seemed to glisten with tears, but then it could have been a trick of the light. "Well. I've no right to tell you how to live your life, but if I were you I should leave Downton before I forgot again." She gave him her hand, and he took it. "I hope when I see you in the village, you'll say hello."

"Of course I will."

She gave his hand a little squeeze and let it go, turning toward the door. She was almost out when she twisted back. "I don't suppose I'll be seeing Sybbie at the village school in a few years?"

"What do you mean?"

"Well, I expect she'll have a governess, who'll teach her all about speaking French and catching a rich husband."

Tom stiffened. _Has to get in one last dig, doesn't she._ "I want to give Sybbie any advantages I can."

"Some might say it isn't much of an advantage for a girl to be educated in the same way in the 1920s that she would have been in the 1880s." And with that Sarah put her shoulder to the door, pushed it open, and stepped out onto the drive. "Good-bye, Tom."

Tom sighed and, since she had her back to him, rolled his eyes. "Good-bye, Sarah."


End file.
